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Subir Chakraborty has spent nearly four decades working in various capacities in several organizations, out of which he spent more than twenty-five years at Exide Industries Ltd, rising from the level of General Manager to the position of Managing Director & CEO. Additionally, he chairs the Boards of several companies such as Chloride Batteries S E Asia Pte Ltd (CBSEA) Espex Batteries Ltd (Espex), Chloride Metals Ltd, Exide Energy Pvt Ltd, Exide Energy Solutions Ltd and Chloride International Ltd. CBSEA and Espex are located in Singapore and UK respectively, while the other companies are located in India. He qualified as a mechanical engineer from IIT Madras, earning his B.Tech in 1980 with a Distinction. Thereafter, he worked for two years as an engineer, and then enrolled at IIM Calcutta to pursue a post graduate programme in Management, completing his PGDM in 1984. He is deeply involved in business bodies and associations and is the President of Bengal Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BCCI). He is also a National Council Member of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). He remains interested in academic pursuits and has been a guest faculty at several reputed management institutions of repute.

Dr. Narayanan Jayaraman is Williams-Wells Fargo Professor of Finance in the Scheller College of Business. He received his Ph. D. from the Katz Graduate School of Business of the University of Pittsburgh. His previous degrees include an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta, and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras. Prior to attending the Ph. D. program, he was employed as a planning manager for five years at Premier Automobiles Ltd., a large automobile organization in Mumbai, India. Dr. Jayaraman received his Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) qualification in 2004. Dr. Jayaraman's research interests are in the areas of Corporate Governance, Mergers and Acquisitions, Corporate Bankruptcy, Option and Equity Market Linkages, and Entrepreneurial Finance. He served as a director on the board of Eastern Financial Association. He is a member of the Program Committee for the Financial Management Association Annual Meetings as well as an ad-hoc referee for several professional journals. He has made over 100 presentations at national and international conferences including the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, and the European Financial Management Association. He has published 45 scholarly articles in various journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Corporate Finance, the Journal of Financial Markets, the Strategic Management Journal, and the Journal of International Business Studies. He is listed in the top four percentile in “Most Prolific Authors in Finance Literature, 1959-2008.” His research has been cited in major press publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Chicago Tribune, Money Magazine, and The Street.com. His paper on the post-listing puzzle won the best paper award at the fourth annual Pacific-Basin conference in Hong Kong. His paper “Institutional investors’ trading behaviour in mergers and acquisitions” published in Advances in Financial Economicshas been selected by the editorial team as an Outstanding Author Contribution in the 2015 Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. His research papers won the best paper award at the India Finance Conferences in 2018 and 2019. He has won several teaching awards including Brady Family Award for Faculty Teaching Excellence, Institute Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence award, Roe Stamps, IV Excellence-in-Teaching award, Lilly Teaching Fellowship award, Core Professor of the year award in the MBA program, and the Professor of the year in the EMBA-MOT program. He has also been recognized for outstanding teaching in the BusinessWeek Guide to Best Business Schools. He has taught in several executive education programs. He has also served as a consultant for several organizations. He won the 2010 Georgia Tech Outstanding Service Award. This honor is in recognition of his conscientious professional service and dedicated support of Georgia Tech. He won the 2020 Ernest Scheller Jr. Award. This honor recognizes a faculty or staff member who aspires to service excellence and who acts as an outstanding role model.

Prabhat K Bezboruah was born in Madras to Sharada Nair and Nil Kamal Bezboruah. While he spent his early childhood in Madras and Calcutta, he later moved to Jorhat, Assam, where he went to school and college, topping his School Boards, and then the University in his Pre Degree and Chemistry Honours courses. After a short stint as a trainee in J Thomas, renowned tea brokers, he joined IIM Calcutta, and after the two-year course, joined Bank of America, where he worked in Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Manila. He left the Bank to pursue a PhD in Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught Options and Futures to BBA students for a while. Returning to India in 1988, he got caught up in his family’s tea business which he started managing from around 1990. Under his leadership, the business has grown from a base of 5 lakh kilos, both organically and through acquisitions, and today produces around 12 million kilos of black tea. A tea planter himself – as managing director of Bokahola Tea Company in Assam – Bezboruah was instrumental in initiating a revamp of the old electronic auctioning system for the tea industry in India. During the course of his tea career, he has been Chairman of Assam Tea Planters’ Association for two terms, Director of Assam Tea Corporation Ltd., Economic Adviser to the Chief Minister, Assam, Member Board of Governors Indian Institute of Plantation Management for five terms, Member Tea Board for two terms, Member SN Menon Committee on Plantation Sector Reforms, Member Tea Advisory Committee under Commerce Ministry, Director Assam Power Distribution Company Ltd., Chairman Tea Research Association (Tocklai) for two terms, Chairman Tea Board India for two terms, and President National Tea Research Foundation. He is a member of several Clubs in Assam and Kolkata, and served as President of Jorhat Gymkhana Club. He is an avid reader, conservationist and animal lover, and also a golfer.

Manjari Sharma is an Impact Entrepreneur building FarmDidi, a food-tech start-up that aims to empower one million rural women. Just over a year old, it has enabled over 1,080 women entrepreneurs through an initiative impacting more than 40 villages in rural Maharashtra. Manjari, the Founder and Chief Didi of FarmDidi, started a for-profit social enterprise with two-fold aim to provide authentic, natural, and healthy food to consumers while empowering rural women. She has worked across the globe with CXOs of Fortune 500 companies in solving their business problems. In November 2020, she set up FarmDidi and now spends all her time in pursuit of her mission to provide healthy, natural and authentic food products to consumers by empowering one million rural women entrepreneurs across India. Hailing from a small town called Bahadurgarh in Haryana, Manjari has grown up seeing her grandfather who has been very active in mentoring students and in helping the community. Her parents have always taught her to make a sincere choice when it came to what she wanted to earn in her lifetime – whether it was money or hearts, or respect. While she was pursuing her MBA at IIM Calcutta, she came across companies like Amul, FabIndia, Jaypore, Lijjat Papad, Gramin Bank etc. who not only created sustainable and profitable businesses but also created mass impact. Their business models inspired her, and she believed that FarmDidi would also be a special case in point like that one day. The goal of FarmDidi is to help women farmers become certified and compliant food processors/manufacturers through mobile tech and provide them with market linkages, thus helping them increase their income. In the last 1.5 years, they have more than 400 Partner Entrepreneur Didis from more than 6 clusters in Maharashtra covering Aurangabad, Raigad, Amravati, Pune, Solapur, Jalgaon, who are trained and compliant food manufacturers and selling their products. They are already seeing up to 3 times increase in their income since they started working with them.